Posters

FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT POSTERS - PAGE 4

Name: Rob Funderburk Job: painter and theater poster artist Station 3 studio. Q. You really produced 120 different posters for Affinity Theater? A. That's right. Each poster has an original painting fixed to it. With this particular project [Sartre's "No Exit"], it was a studio production experiment. They're 9 inches square so I put up 9-inch-square papers on my wall like a grid. Each square is an independent composition, but there's a general theme: Three figures wind up in hell; hell is a Second Empire French drawing room, and these three people have to exist in eternity in this room.

It was Mark Grace Poster Day at Wrigley Field recently, and at the end of the day, after the Cubs had dropped a tough 1-0 decision to the Houston Astros, hundreds-maybe thousands-of fans hurled the posters onto the field. Was Grace disgraced? Nah. "I didn`t see them," Grace said. "The game finished and I went into the clubhouse and everyone told me they threw the posters on the field. "I didn`t blame them. We didn`t put on a very good show." You didn`t feel bad? "Why feel bad?

Miramax must remove posters for Michael Moore's new documentary on corporate America because they look too much like the ones for "Men in Black," a judge ruled. Miramax argued that the posters for "The Big One" were meant as a parody of the Columbia Pictures sci-fi adventure. But U.S. District Judge Audrey B. Collins ruled Tuesday that Columbia could probably prove copyright infringement. The "Men in Black" poster features Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones dressed in black, wearing dark sunglasses, carrying guns and standing in front of the New York City skyline.

Special-edition posters celebrating the 30 years of underwater photography that began with the first underwater camera, developed by Jacques Cousteau and Jean de Wouters, are available through Nikon Inc. The design, silkscreened in teal and violet colors with a black border, features the two Cousteau ships and an abstract sea creature. The 1,000 copies of the poster have been signed by Jean-Michel Cousteau, executive vice president of the Cousteau Society, which has been associated with Nikon for 30 years.

Holland is known for its stunning graphic arts. Now anyone can own a piece of them. Dutch billboard posters that were not used and bound for the garbage dump are being fashioned into something called De Paperbag. A painted wood snake table by Nimbus,$780, could be used in a variety of ways. "People are using them for everything," says Christina Araya, spokeswoman for the Teunen Collection, the New York-based graphic and industrial design firm that is importing the oversize paper bags.

There's an uncomfortable timeliness to the Smithsonian American Art Museum's "Over the Top: American Posters From World War I." Falling somewhere between publicity and propaganda, these images from 1917 to 1919 were designed, for the most part, to sell war bonds. In a larger sense, they were advertisements for the war itself. "Man, they really demonized them, didn't they?" a recent visitor was heard to comment, in response to Henry Raleigh's depiction of a shadowy German soldier threatening a young mother and her infant.

Fourteen-year-old Jenny Stringham has definite ideas about world peace. Jenny recently placed in the top 25 out of about 200,000 students in a contest to design a peace poster. The contest was sponsored by Lions Club International for junior high school students. Eight other American students finished in the top 25. `My message is for people to look past the differences of people, to see the good in one another for world peace," said Jenny, an 8th-grade student at Homer Junior High School.

Graphic artists often feed off innovations in the high-art realms of painting, photography and the like; a very few are able to blur the distinction between the fine and applied arts. Polish-born Roman Cieslewicz has been able to adapt and syncretize elements of several important 20th Century art movements in his posters and collages, a large selection of which can be seen at the Polish Museum of America through Sunday. The works on display span his long career, from early works executed in Warsaw as early as 1956 to some as recent as this year.

Several "Jaws" movie posters displayed on Los Angeles beach trash cans and lifeguard stations have critics snapping that the toothy posters frighten children. Youngsters and beachgoers who don't speak English might mistake the advertisements for a warning, they argue, even though shark attacks are virtually unheard of here. "This is offensive. Certainly, it's inappropriate," said beach activist Howard Bennett. He said his 3-year-old granddaughter refused to swim after seeing an ad on a trash barrel.

On the eve of parliamentary elections, three candidates from the ruling Bosnian Serb party were disqualified Friday for displaying posters of war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, responsible for supervising the balloting Saturday and Sunday, removed the three from the roster of the Serb Democratic Party and warned it would disqualify two more candidates each day the posters remained up. Karadzic, the wartime Bosnia Serb leader under indictment by a UN tribunal, withdrew from public life last year but continues to wield immense influence.